Easy Baking Substitutions

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The U-Store has a great selection of ingredients and baking goods, but is still rather limited when it comes to certain ingredients. Plus, without a real supermarket within walking distance of campus, making sure you can get the right ingredients for a recipe can be stressful. Here are two easy substitutions to make up for common ingredients that the U-Store lacks.

Photo by Lisa Gong

Unsalted Butter

A lot of recipes (such as Nestle Tollhouse Chocolate Chip Cookies) call for unsalted butter but then list an amount of salt to be added. If you only have access to salted butter, a good general rule is to reduce the amount of additional salt by ¼ of a teaspoon per stick of salted butter used. This substitution works wonderfully, and because salt is rarely an essential element to the recipe, the substitution is very flexible.

Photo by Lisa Gong

Cake Flour

Cake flour is not a very common ingredient, yet recipe books such as 500 Cupcakes seem to almost exclusively call for cake flour. Cake flour differs from all-purpose flour in its protein content; the protein content of cake flour is 6-8%, while the protein content of all-purpose flour is generally around 11%.

If you wish to substitute all-purpose flour for cake flour, take out 2 tablespoons of flour for every cup used. This substitution is not quite perfect. Making cupcakes with the all-purpose flour substitution yields a denser cupcake than what one would create with cake flour, but these cupcakes still turn out delectable and will be quickly snatched from any plate.